We love Money Heist, too, but it's probably time for a break from Netflix. So, join us for our upcoming web events on bats' (undeserved?) Wednesday, May 27, 4 p.m. Eastern: Are Bats Really to Blame for the COVID-19 Pandemic? Tuesday, June 2, 4 p.m. Eastern: Free Speech Project: Should We Think Twice Before Limiting Political Advocacy? Earlier this month, Singapore unveiled Spot, a social distancing-enforcing robotic dog that is now "patrolling" a park.

From Star Trek's Data and 2001's HAL to Columbus Day's Skippy the Magnificent, pop culture is chock full of fully conscious AI who, in many cases, are more human than the humans they serve alongside. But is all that self-actualization really necessary for these synthetic life forms to carry out their essential duties? In his new book, How to Grow a Robot: Developing Human-Friendly, Social AI, author Mark H. Lee examines the social shortcomings of the today's AI and delves into the promises and potential pitfalls surrounding deep learning techniques, currently believed to be our most effective tool at building robots capable of doing more than a handful of specialized tasks. In the excerpt below, Lee argues that the robots of tomorrow don't necessarily need -- nor should they particularly seek out -- the feelings and experiences that make up the human condition. Although I argue for self-awareness, I do not believe that we need to worry about consciousness.

Spending on video games in the US jumped to a new April record as locked-down consumers sought refuge in play, industry figures released Friday showed. A total of $1.5 billion was spent on video game hardware, software, accessories and game cards, eclipsing a previous April high of $1.2 billion spent in the US in 2008, according to NPD analyst Mat Piscatella. April was the first full month of tight restrictions on people's movements in the US to prevent the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus. Sales of video game software alone climbed 55 percent to $662 million, a new record high for the month, according to NPD. "Final Fantasy VII: Remake" was the top-selling game during the month, setting a new sales record for the blockbuster vide game franchise, Piscatella's analysis showed. "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" continued to be a hot seller, being the second most purchased title during April, followed by "Animal Crossing: New Horizons." Animal Crossing has been the best-selling game for Nintendo Switch consoles during the past year, according to NPD.

A survey has been compiled on the topic of "Universal Adversarial Perturbations", entirely by the student members of Vision and Language Group, IIT Roorkee. It is a compilation and analysis of the latest advancements in the field of universal adversarial perturbation, which is basically a small noise that can be added to any image in a dataset to fool a neural network. The arXiv preprint for the same can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.08087 Hope you will find it useful and any constructive feedback is welcome!!

Humanoid robot Pepper is placed at the lobby area of a hotel in Tokyo reserved for coronavirus patients with mild or no symptoms. Researchers say they could soon be undertaking all front and back of house activities in hotels to help the industry from the coronavirus crisis. These include cooking hamburgers and cleaning floors, as well as serving cocktails, checking in hotel guests, and delivering items to hotel rooms. They say the development of service robots are anticipated to increase efficiency and productivity of hotel activities. The team from the University of Surrey spoke to 19 different hotel HR experts to identify the key trends and major challenges that will emerge in the next ten years.

A team of researchers hailing from Harvard and Université de Montréal today launched Epitopes.world, It's built atop an algorithm -- CAMAP -- that generates predictions for potential vaccine targets, enabling researchers to identify which parts of the virus are more likely to be exposed at the surface (epitopes) of infected cells. Project lead Dr. Tariq Daouda, who worked alongside doctorates in machine learning, immunobiologists, and bioinformaticians to build Epitopes.world, Fewer than 12% of all drugs entering clinical trials end up in pharmacies, and it takes at least 10 years for medicines to complete the journey from discovery to the marketplace. Clinical trials alone take six to seven years, on average, putting the cost of R&D at roughly $2.6 billion, according to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

Prevention of violent extremism in India is an important and necessary requirement for the country.

Social media timelines have been saturated with news of layoffs across industries. While the Covid-19 effect is being felt by companies across the spectrum, startups have taken the biggest hit. In fact, two of India's fastest growing unicorns – Ola and Swiggy – have cumulatively laid off 2,500 employees just this week. While organisational restructuring is routine, this widespread workforce transformation has emerged from distress sales, slow business growth and even company closures in some cases, all augmented by the oncoming recession. This necessitates that companies undergo a major overhaul and rethink their workforce strategies to make way for some disruptive changes.

At Altair, chief technology officer Sam Mahalingam is heads-down testing the company's newest software for designing cars, buildings, windmills, and other complex systems. The engineering and design software company, whose customers include BMW, Daimler, Airbus, and General Electric, is developing software that combines computer models of wind and fluid flows with machine design in the same process--so an engineer could design a turbine blade while simultaneously seeing its draft's effect on neighboring mills in a wind farm. What Altair needs for a job as hard as this, though, is a particular kind of computing power, provided by graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Silicon Valley's Nvidia and others. "When solving complex design challenges like the interaction between wind structures in windmills, GPUs help expedite computing so faster business decisions can be made," Mahalingam says. An aerodynamics simulation performed with Altair ultraFluidX on the Altair CX-1 concept design, modeled in Altair Inspire Studio. Altair, which offers its computational fluid dynamics software on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and other cloud computing services, is testing new GPU capabilities to improve how its software solves the complex physics problems that simulate a car's behavior in a wind tunnel, see how windmills' turbulence affect each another, or understand wind flows around skyscrapers long before construction begins.

Machine intelligence has been a military research goal for decades, but is it even worth it? Artificial intelligence research reaches toward long-held visions of human-machine symbiosis, and all the benefits this would have for military might. Even if scientists fall short of these lofty ambitions, or even if they prove impossible to fully achieve, aiming for them may move humanity further along the path of scientific progress -- but are small increments of progress worth billions of taxpayer dollars? Such ambitions for generic AI systems have fueled research programs across the defense landscape since the late 1960s. The Strategic Computing Program grew out of the context of the early 1980s --an optimism about the ability of computers to solve military problems coupled with the Reagan administration's Cold War push to bolster the United States through technology advancement and big defense budgets.